Many pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles and automobiles are fitted with a trailer hitch receiver. These receivers were originally designed to receive a tongue of a trailer. A type of trailer hitch receiver common in North America takes the form of a hollow square steel tube that may have an internal dimension across opposed side walls of 2 inches, or, in a light-duty version, of 1.25 inches.
Subsequently, these trailer hitch receivers have been used to mount all manner of accessories from the rear of the vehicle. One class of these accessories is hitch steps, by which a user of a vehicle may gain convenient access to the vehicle roof or the cargo area. In one type of hitch step, the hitch step is fabricated of steel and a step body or tread surface is simply tack-welded to a post that in turn is inserted into the trailer hitch receiver. Applicant developed another kind of hitch step that is injection-molded from a stiff but resilient thermoplastic elastomer (TPE). An example of this hitch step can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 9,145,035 B2, owned by the Applicant.
Applicant has also machined hitch steps from solid billets of aluminum that are similar in appearance to its TPE hitch steps. More recently, Applicant has developed reinforced TPE hitch steps in which the step body is as much as 24 inches wide, masking a larger portion of the rear bumper of the vehicle from the possibility of rear end collisions and offering enhanced access to the vehicle roof. However, issues have arisen when attempting to machine an all-metal version of these transversely extended hitch steps. Not the least among these is the amount of metal that is wasted when such a hitch step is machined out of a single billet. It would be desirable to reduce this waste, while at the same time continuing to produce a machined metal hitch step with excellent structural integrity.